OPEN MIC: with George Negus
Banging on during a lively speaking engagement recently, things took a turn when surprise, surprise, out of the blue – or possibly the red – a member of the audience asked if I could come up with just one word to describe the current shambolic state of Australian politics. “Silly,” I responded. “Come on, George, surely you can do better than ‘silly’?”
“Okay, then. How about ‘stupid’? That’s got six letters, not a measly five!”
Of course, I admit I was having a tongue-in-cheek lend of the audience, but that did nothing to stop a rowdy reaction from many. The looks on their faces told me they were wondering if I was joking. It was a warm Friday afternoon, after all, and I had mentioned to them at the outset not to take much of what I had to say too seriously.
Joking!? Let me assure you, by the time we got around to discussing what might be done to tone down what appears – to this professional political observer – to be an almost constant whinge from a large chunk of Australia, the audience had really hit its straps.
The most vehemently pissed-off of our fellow Australians will tell you with very little prompting that they just can’t stand “it” and “them”. They’ve had enough of both, and everything is getting worse.
What exactly is this totally unacceptable “it” and who are the irredeemable “them”? You’ve got it – politicians. According to popular opinion, the whole bloody lot of them are the same – a useless waste of everyone’s time and money.
What was made clear to me during this afternoon with 300 fair-dinkum, hard-working Aussies was that it didn’t seem to matter which of our political parties they voted for (or didn’t vote for), their verdict was in: they’re all the bloody same.
I know I’m not going to win any popularity contests here, but I roundly disagree. Here’s a piece of heresy that doesn’t go down all that well with folk who believe that, “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, a politician always wins”: we have a House of Representatives, and that’s what it is – a group of people who we’ve elected to represent us. We need to accept some responsibility here, because they wouldn’t be calling those shots without us. Every one of them reflects a decision made at a polling booth by an average Aussie like you or me.
Democracies operate to give people choices. Some democracies are more or less effective, but most of us agree they’re better than the alternative. Given that fact, if we carry on – and most of us do – about how fortunate we are to live in a democracy, then I reckon it’s incumbent upon us not to bury our heads in the sand.
How many of us can honestly say we’ve done the due diligence on who our local members are and what they stand for? How many of us have visited their office? Asked how they’ll vote on the issues that are important to us? Sent them an email? Not a bad idea before we write them off. And not a bad idea before we vote.
If we all decided to do something as simple as finding out for ourselves why Scott Morrison joined the Liberal Party and is therefore on the ideological Right, and why Bill Shorten joined the Labor Party and is on the ideological Left, we might be on the way to learning why they and their policies are not, “all the bloody same”. Because they’re not. There are fundamental differences in philosophy and policy between Liberal, Labor, the Greens and the rest.
I’m not for one minute denying we have problems.
I’ve been as horrified as the next voter by the bullying and deceit in parliament. I’ll admit we’ve got plenty to do right now to make a country we claim to cherish better than the chaotic mess we hear about on a daily basis.
But why not start by having a think about who we’re going to vote for at the coming election and dropping them a line to let them know what we expect of an elected representative?
One final question to all of our disgruntled mates. If we don’t have political parties, what should we have instead? Maybe we should try the old two-up? Heads you win, tails you lose! Or what about licking our index fingers and holding them up to see which way the political breeze is blowing? We could always try putting government up for tender.
If we don’t know what separates our would-be representatives, perhaps it’s a question we should ask of them, out loud. In the process you might accidently find out what kind of Australia you’d prefer to live in.